Planning future cities requires not science fiction, writes Lynsey Hanley, but a firm grasp of practicalities
The great myth about cities is that there is nothing that can be done to make them better. It is natural that they are unequal, sprawling, organic: they give pleasure to an urbane elite and opportunity to the huddled masses who arrive on their outskirts hoping to break in. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, in his two-year study of Lagos, decided that this clogged, chaotic corner of Nigeria worked well in its own anarchic fashion, and that to endow it with an infrastructure would, perversely, lead to economic and social entropy.
In other words, never mind the pollution, think of the vitality. Within a couple of years, more than 50 per cent of the world's population will be living in cities, and the quality, longevity and health of the newly urbanised will, despite Koolhaas's faith in benign neglect, depend on whether we can house them well in cities that are neither ugly nor damaging to the environment.
Mike Davis's book Planet of Slums, published last year (Verso, £15.99), described a world in which the opposite is already happening: where our lack of concern for poor people's living conditions will cause large cities to become disease-ridden hell-pits. The future, in his view, is more to do with who is prepared to spend money than with who can design us out of such a mess.
A debate held in mid-March at the Hayward Gallery in London, silly and thought-provoking by turns, suggested that there are such things as mental, moral and aesthetic slums, which - if built unchecked - will destroy lives as readily as "real" slums. The event was organised by Artscape, a project dedicated to encouraging the use of "video paintings" of tranquil outdoor scenes to lessen the alienating effects of the urban environment. The well-intended optimism of Artscape's founder, Hilary Lawson, scraped painfully against the urgency of the key speaker, Bill Dunster, designer of the BedZed housing development in Wallington, Surrey.
As Lawson spoke of his belief that city-dwellers could connect their lives again with nature through Artscape's video art, Dunster relayed the sobering fact that every four-person UK household, through overconsumption of fossil fuels, will indirectly cause the deaths of four people in a heat- or drought-affected world "hot spot". The Argentinian artist Tomas Saraceno then presented his vision of cities that no longer took up valuable space on the ground, but were suspended in the air using materials common to astronauts' spacesuits.
Saraceno's faith in Aerogel - a fabric with the floating properties of helium - gave rise to an exciting vision of a floating "airport city" which nevertheless seemed hopelessly foggy-minded, when presented alongside Dunster's eminently practical and attractive zero-carbon housing schemes. BedZed emphasises the use of natural over man-made materials, the importance of integrated public transport links, and the reduction of consumption wherever possible.
Imagine the impact of such eminent good sense on the rapidly growing cities of China, where the work of Dunster's architectural practice is currently, and gratifyingly so, in high demand. Think of the avoidance of pollution and waste, the bypassing of the class segregation created by our industrial revolution, and the creation of cities that are sustainable and beautiful from the outset. All this goes to disprove both Davis's pessimism and Koolhaas's anarchism.
Dunster firmly believes that we haven't got time to faff around with untried and untested versions of the city when the future of the planet is at stake. In any case, urban areas are growing with every hour that someone spends wondering what to do about them. At the Artscape event, Jay Merrick, architecture critic of the Independent, spoke of the "strip city" that is forming a vast unbroken bridge of habitation between Accra, the Ghanaian capital, and Benin City in Nigeria, so far apart that two countries, Togo and Benin, lie between them. And with every hour, another 21 people arrive in Lagos to live.
There is a place for both Dunster and Saraceno, as there is for projects such as Artscape, whose aim is simply to remind us how important it is to see beautiful things. What is sorely lacking is any sort of integration between the three. If the future city is to be functional without being dull, we will need to use our imagination, and yet a firm grasp of practicalities is necessary if (quite apart from roasting to death by our own hand) we are to avoid repeating the expensive mistakes that laid waste to once-great American cities in the 1960s and 1970s.
The idea of "smart growth", where suburban sprawl is contained and cities treated as complicated entities rather than great blobs of self-same human activity, is explored with great optimism and spirit by Anne Power and John Houghton in their new book, Jigsaw Cities (Policy Press, £23.99), an account of Birmingham's loop- the-loop from civic pride to slum clearance, of the hollowed-out "doughnut city" and its recent transformation into a more liveable, yet unequal space in which more people are settling by choice but others remain trapped.
Bad urban design and plain bad architecture, write Power and Houghton, are the enemies of cities the world over. As an example, they cite prefabricated tower blocks that the arrogant burghers of Birmingham City Council bought from mass building companies "like bags of sweets" during the 1960s. Add to that the lack of sustainability shown in the unchecked sprawl of Chinese cities that are yet to employ Dunster's zero-energy designs, and Davis's vision suddenly appears more prophetic than dystopic.
Power and Houghton ask why we can't have more settlements like Bournville, the original sustainable village, built a mile or two from Birmingham's centre by the Cadbury chocolate-making family at the turn of the 20th century. It is sustainable in the sense that it was built well enough for people to want to live there for the whole of their lives, thus preventing the breaking up of households into ever smaller units, which causes sprawl, needless commuting, carbon-heavy building and further consumption. Bournville remains as beautiful as it was in 1900. Perhaps, after all, some of the answers to the future of cities lie in the past.
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